Tag Archives: errors

A little over three weeks ago, I blogged about doing a Year-in-Review book on Shutterfly and submitting, then waiting. The book arrived, and as with a previous book by them, there are some parts that underwhelm. There are a few places where I feel like the printer colour ran a bit. Not enough in this case to send it back (I had the previous one reprinted), just enough to mildly notice.

I was also looking to do a Trip Book for the family trip to B.C. back in 2010. These ones are similar in size to the Year in Review ones, I like the 8.5×11 inches size in landscape mode, but they didn’t have to be identical. And after checking out a bunch of sites, I decided at the end of the post to go with one of Shoppers / Loblaws / Uniprix (they have the same interface software).

Except then I didn’t. I tried loading Costco, just to try it, and this time it worked. Perfectly fine. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of Shutterfly, far fewer layouts and themes, or stickers, but still pretty solid. It was however a lot easier to see the full suite of what was available all at once than it is in Shutterfly, where the full list can quickly overwhelm you (20000 backgrounds????).

It is a bit harder to compare the books. The travel book is thinner than the Year ones, but overall, it turned out pretty well. I even found some of it simpler. I’m letting my wife figure out if there is a difference in quality before I do more. The timing with Costco is certainly far more controllable — printed in Canada, picked up in Canada, etc. I got it way faster than the Shutterfly book, and no printing glitches either. But I’d be hard pressed to say the quality of the covers is as solid. Nice, but not quite as good. I just don’t think I care about the difference enough to stay with Shutterfly. However, Shutterfly has some sweet deals regularly, and I don’t think Costco does. Not that I’ve seen so far, anyway.

I like using our digital photos for different things — the website, a digital photo frame, some prints around the office, custom calendars, etc. And annual photobooks — a Year-In-Review style that goes month-by-month. Except I’m a bit behind on them, having only completed three or so of the last 13 years worth of organized digital photos that are in my digital gallery. So when I added “Make a Photobook” to my #50by50 list, it wasn’t a specific commitment like “Make a photobook of (someone’s) wedding” or “Make a photobook of a specific trip or year”, it was “knock one off the long list of photobooks you want to do” i.e. get back into making them.

Starting with a Year-In-Review book

Just over two years ago, I took a look at several websites that offer do-it-yourself photobooks, and I gave a bunch a try. Some of them failed for software limitations, others for their variable quality. I pretty much ended up going strictly with Shutterfly in the end. For my new YIR book, I thought I might as well start with Shutterfly again.

Shutterfly is a solid site overall, with all the basics plus some bells and whistles. They have regular coupon deals, established history, and I can reuse/copy old projects to incrementally improve each year while keeping some basic consistency. And lots of extra product possibilities like mousepads, notepads, notebooks, magnets, mugs, etc. I re-familiarized myself with the site and didn’t see any major changes in the functionality of the web design in the last two years, still no downloadable software to do it and then upload as one piece but rather still just all online, and the default templates for “years in review” are still not particularly attractive (only two main defaults from which to choose). Still, a solid choice. There are e-share options too, but I’m not particularly attracted to them nor do I need the option since I have my own photo gallery site with more content than would go in the books.

I bit the bullet. I put together a year in review (or actually a partial year in review) for the second half of 2010. In so doing though, I wanted to revisit the basic design of their template and see if I could create a new master template that I could reuse for future YIRs. Some of it was quite simple — adding background colours, putting in the months of the year, making sure every month has at least four pages to start with, etc. It took me most of a day to put the template in some form that I could call a “master” draft to build from for the future, but I only have to do it once and it probably took me longer as I was coming back “new” to the software/website. I then copied it over to a new project for a backup. And then used that to create “2010 – Book 2”.

Choosing the photos is a bit more of an iterative process than one might think. Here’s my general work-flow:

a. I copy all the photos from Andrea’s phone, the compact point-and-shoot camera, my phone, my tablet (rare), and the DSLR, plus any that others happened to send us of shared events into a set of photos by month;

b. I then sort them into days and events;

c. I pick the best ones for uploading, sending everything else into sub-folders called “extras”, keeping about one for every 2-3 that go in the extras folder (I don’t delete photos unless they’re blurry or technically wrong for some other eason…I’ve gone back too many times to a photo that was perhaps good for everyone, but in looking at the extras, I find one that is GREAT for a specific person, allowing me to crop it to just them);

d. For a Photobook, I start with the web choices, and weed it down to a smaller list of possibles, and then let Andrea weed even further.

I uploaded the weeded set to Shutterfly and the template worked almost perfectly. A couple of little tweaks here and there, but not enough to warrant changing the master, more tweaks for colouring with the photos I was laying out in the template. I added some prose, chose some photos for the covers and inside page, and bam! I submitted the book with a 50% off coupon. Sweet.

Now I just have to wait.

Considering a Trip Book

I’m willing to experiment with other sites, just to try them out, and I’m going with some trips as the theme. But which one to try?

a. MixBook

Last time I tried Mixbook, the software was a bit unwieldy. This time, I found 11 templates for “Year in Review” style books. The Minimalist style was a bit black and white, but cute; Linen / Vintage / Colourful YIR / A Year to Remember / Year in Review / My Year Magazine / Graduation Year in Review / Watercolour Year in Review are all more thematic or event-driven than I would like. The one called Family Yearbook would be an awesome style for people with multiple kids and I could see easy ways to adapt it. However, the Kraft Year in Review is outright awesome. Simple chronological design, exactly what I am looking for in YIR-style without weird or wonky titles for each month. My only complaint is it is a bit drab … most of the layouts could benefit from a bit more colour per page. The software seemed to work okay, and as with most, you do a lot better with everything pre-chosen before you start. Definitely a viable option, and an improvement over previous attempts.

b. Costco

Since the last time I tried, CostCo has updated their software and their book builder looks a little better, albeit somewhat slow to get it to click over to the “ready” stage. Or more specifically, it goes off to “prepare” the book for editing and never returns. Just sits and “spins” that it is doing something and never finishes. Maybe it doesn’t like Firefox, maybe the site is busy, I don’t know. Pass.

c. Shoppers Drug Mart

The software seems better this time than last, and I was able to navigate through a few choices to get to a reasonable option for a book. I chose their one and only Year in Review template, and it isn’t bad. The overall layout and control options are much more basic than other sites, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing — some of the others are a bit overkill. Definitely a viable option I might consider.

d. Loblaws

If you go to the Loblaws site, you won’t find their photo book options because their photo service is separate — aka Photolab.ca. And it looks surprisingly familiar. Like with my previous review, Loblaws has the exact same software as Shoppers Drug Mart for their site, it just has a different name. But functionality, templates, etc are the same. So again, a viable option.

e. Uniprix

I wasn’t overly impressed the last time I tried the UniPrix site, but a friend suggested I give it another try, as he had good luck with it. So I gave it a go. Like SDM and Loblaws, it has some basic options, nothing extravagant. And while the opening interface is different, the final operations are almost identical for the software with Loblaws and SDM. A few differences, for sure, but functionally the same.

f. Blurb

PhotoBookGirl is an online reviewer of photobook designs, and she has a bunch of reviews of different photo sites (mainly in the U.S.), so I wanted to give a few of them a try too. Blurb was up first. Blurb has some amazing options to upload a PDF and to sell things onwards into Amazon, but that’s not my focus. When Blurb Bookify starts, you get to the editing options pretty quick but that’s because the main options of other sites — draft templates, layouts, etc. — are all missing. Pass.

g. Bookemon

Like Blurb, it has options to create a book for sale — including kids books, etc. But the templates that come with it, and the basic interface are a bit too menu driven and mechanical than designed to populate things for you. Pass.

h. Clark Color Labs

The software for CCL is pretty clean. I set up an account easily, uploaded some photos pretty fast, and wandered through their templates. I’m looking for Year In Review designs, and while there weren’t many (only 3), they were all quite vibrant in colour. A very different look and feel to the template than Shutterfly or even Mixbook. The only challenge was that some of the months were set for a single page, others were spread over two, with no rhyme or reason. Plus there didn’t seem to be a reason why in some months they chose to put the name of the month on the page and others just a symbol (St. Patrick’s Day images for March, for example). Where they make up for some of it though is in their easy to access clipart. On a lot of sites, it is hard to find good clip art to add to the layout, but they make it pretty easy, and it was easy to add the months of the year for example or change a background. Overall a pretty simple and direct option. I have no idea if the quality out the other end is any good, but it’s a pretty nice site.

i. Picaboo

The site has some power, no doubt, and if you want to start from a very minimalist book layout, it’s a great choice. There are only five main themes, variations on “white”, but no choice between a year in revew or a trip or graduation. You can add all that, but you start with a blank template. Not a problem, but why would I want to do all that extra work unless I was starting with a very unique project? Pass.

j. Snapfish

Upfront, Snapfish has some great opening choices in sizes. I’m mainly interested in the landscape 8 x 11 books, but there were quite a few other choices too. When I chose YIR, just because it is an easy way to decide if it’s viable or not, eight sample templates came up. Most of them are comparable to the Shutterfly and Mixbook options, so nothing to really sell me there. Clicking on “Travel” pulled up another 12 options. One of them was called Road Trip (which a lot of my trips are), and pre-organized around Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, etc. So a viable option again.

So that gives me a full dozen options, including the original Shutterfly.

However, there is one small feature I like about the Shoppers / Loblaws / Uniprix option. I can print it and pick it up. No shipping required. And while I can’t guarantee the quality until I try it, it’s also not likely being shipped off to the lowest common producer elsewhere. There is a bit of local production involved. I hope at least. So I’ll try one of those three first.

I’ll see how it goes and update later. In the meantime, I’m waiting for my YIR book for 2010.

Add wedge plate underneath to ensure legs are at full extension and locked;

If using vibration suppression pads under the legs, add them underneath now;

Add top of mount/arm if not already attached (I leave mine attached all the time);

Attach Optical Tube Assembly (OTA)…some people attach it with the tube horizontal, Celestron name plate facing you and readable, tightening knob underneath. I find it FAR easier to have the knob facing left so that I am attaching the OTA vertically with the opening facing up and my star diagonal / back plate facing down. This allows me to rest the star diagonal in my right hand while standing “behind” the arm, and guiding it with my left hand into the mounting rail slot. Then I tighten. By doing this, I also make sure that my star diagonal has clearance underneath i.e. the thickness of my hand, so just in case when I’m viewing I go to zenith, it will clear my base. This works awesome for me;

Plug in power source, as the AA batteries drain quickly (which will then make the alignment and mount start to go wonky fast);

Turn on scope, lower tube to horizontal position, turn off scope;

Level the scope…now that the weight is on it, you need to level it, mostly by adjusting the legs on the tripod. I have both a simple bubble level (allows you to see all directions, not just the one direction that a typical hand level shows you) and an app on my phone called Cliniometer;

It will then ask you for some basic data, but if you have changed locations from the last time you viewed, you should hit UNDO to go back to where it says something like CITY DATABASE or CUSTOM SITE, and if possible, use CUSTOM SITE. It will then ask you for your GPS coordinates in longitude and latitude by HOURS:MINUTES:SECONDS. Google Maps will give you the coordinates if you go to the exact spot, and then right click on the spot, choose What’s Here, and when it shows you decimal coordinates, click on them and it will show them in HOURS:MINUTES:SECONDS. Or skip GOOGLE MAPS and download an app like GPS COORDINATES for Android which will tell you direct, or within Sky Safari or Sky Portal by clicking on settings, current location. It will give you the exact coordinates you need. Enter both longitude and latitude. Ignore the negative part of the number, it will ask you if it is north/south or east/west. (* Note that you can use the city database, but cities are large, and the larger the city, the greater margin of error you are adding to the process.);

Enter your time, date, whether it is DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME or not, and the timezone you’re in. Best if you can be as accurate as possible on your time;

Align your spotter scope or TelRad or red-dot finder. This is what helps you find things without looking through the eyepiece. Generally, I find TelRads are the quickest and fastest options, but some people like having a separate spotter scope mounted. Nobody likes the red-dot finder. However, regardless of the three options, the process is generally the same — point your scope towards something on the horizon that you can see;

Now you’re ready to choose your first star. The scope will give you an obvious list of good stars to choose from. If you are like me and aren’t always sure which one is Polaris (don’t ask), or Vega, choose one that you can learn and that you can’t miss. For me, that’s Mizar, and it’s almost always on the list (if it isn’t there, I can do MANUAL TWO-STAR and select it). I can almost always see the Big Dipper when I’m viewing, and it is pretty clear which one in the handle is Mizar. Plus it’s a double star so if I look through the scope and see it, I know if it is Mizar or I’m off. It’s pretty easy to tell if it is the right one or not. Alignment of your first star takes TWO steps. First, you get it in your FoV generally using your red dot finder (blech) or a TelRad or spotting scope — you just need to get it close enough so you can see it in the eyepiece, don’t worry how close to centre it is. Then, you press ENTER. Now you’re ready for fine-tuning…the important part to know though is that the drive for the scope has slippage in it. To keep it tight, and give yourself the best alignment, you want to be pressing UP and RIGHT as the last two movements on your scope before pressing align. For me, with a star diagonal on my scope, it means I need to be in the upper left quadrant of my eyepiece. Then, when I press UP it will take me down towards the middle, and right will take me the right to get to the middle. If I overshoot either one, I can’t just back up a little, because that would mean going down or left on the hand controller i.e. within the “play” of the scope, and the alignment won’t be tight. Instead, I have to go past the middle points again, and then go UP and RIGHT on the hand controller to get to where I think the middle is. How do you know if you’re in the “middle”? Three ways:

Eyeball it. Of course, the less precise you are, the greater the margin of error when you’re done;

Use a lighted reticule — this is basically an eyepiece you can buy that has a little red light in it and a grid. It looks like a target screen. You can use your general eyepiece to get in close to centre, and then this lighted one to get exactly dead centre;

Use the doughnut method — this one is completely counter-intuitive. Instead of a “tight” focus, turn your focus knob to make it extremely UNFOCUSED. Your tiny little star will star to look like a small doughnut, then a medium sized doughnut, then a large doughnut. Which will let you gauge the distance from the edge of the doughnut to the edges of your eyepiece. In other words, instead of guessing if your little marble is close to the centre of a basketball hoop, you’re guessing if your large beachball is centred in the hoop. Much easier to tell how far from the “four” sides (up / down / left / right). But again, you still want to be going UP and RIGHT as your last movements;

Press Align;

If you used the doughnut method, refocus to a tight star point view;

Choose Star 2 from the list (see some notes below about stars to choose). You ideally want a star that is in a different part of the sky, at least 15 degrees above the horizon, and preferably, at a different height than your first star (so that it is working with different angles, not just rotation along the same altitude). The great part is you don’t really need to know which is which. Once you press ENTER to choose the star, the mount is going to rotate to that star with its best guess as to where it is. So it might say let’s go to Skat. Except you don’t know Skat at all. Doesn’t matter. Because when it slews to Skat, you’re going to see likely only one really bright star within a Field of View (FoV) of where it stopped. In other words, you’ll just go to the nearest bright star to where it stops, centre it in the same way as you did for the first star, get it close to centre in your eyepiece, press ENTER. Then do your UP and RIGHT to do final alignment to centre (with eyeballing it, using a lighted reticule, or making it look like a doughnut again). Press align;

You should get a message after a few seconds that says “Alignment Success”;

Test your alignment. Most people will pick a third target and say, “Okay, let’s look at Saturn.” Which makes sense, right? You did alignment on two stars, let’s see how it finds a third. Instead, though, you should tell it to go back to the first star (Mizar in my example above). Because you should be DEAD ON for that star, it’s one of your alignment stars. And then you can tell it to go back to Star 2. If either are not dead centre, something’s wrong with your alignment. And if I had to guess, I would bet it was the UP and RIGHT play for your final alignment. It could be leveling or your stars, or whatever, but I’m betting you’re off with the final alignment step, it’s the most common. Which part of the alignment was the problem? If you’re generally above or below the star, it was your vertical (your final UP motion) aka your altitude. If you’re generally left or right of the target, it is the horizontal (your final RIGHT motion) aka your azimuth. Note that on my default settings, the UP/DOWN settings were initially set to INVERTED in the menu, so I spent two years doing DOWN and RIGHT, thus throwing off my altitude every time. Grrr…;

If your two alignment stars came back solid, you’re good to go. Start looking for new objects! Note that objects close to your alignment stars will be the most precise, including those in between. Those objects farther away from those points of alignment will be less precise, but likely still within the FoV of a 25mm eyepiece. That was the default EP sold with the 8SE in most cases, and apparently the accuracy of the scope was kind of geared to it;

Choosing good stars

What are the best two stars to choose? There are some basic tips online ranging from types of two-stars (generally at different altitudes, not complete polar opposites, both more than 15 degrees above the horizon, etc.) to specific suggestions. On CloudyNights, a guy named Curt B posted back in 2015 and suggested the following stars:

January: Capella & Aldebaran

February / March: Sirius & Rigel

April: Regulus & Procyon

May: Regulus & Arcturus

June/July: Vega & Arcturus

August: Altair & Deneb

September: Altair & Rasalhague/Vega

October: Altair & Vega

November: Altair & Caph/Vega

December: Enif & Hamal

As I mentioned above, I choose Mizar whenever I can because it is so CLEARLY Mizar and not something else. Most people start with Polaris as they are confident they can find it. Depending on my light polluted skies, I’m not always 100% sure. Mizar has no doubts. Some people like software combos on their desktop to make a list and http://www.ilanga.com/bestpair/ has some free software. It has been superceded by a program called AstroPlanner, but you have to pay for that one (although it has lots of great functions). If I run Best Pair II, and enter the 15th of the month for 2017 and 8:00 p.m., here is what I get as the best pair in my rough area (Ottawa):

Jan 15: Deneb and Arcturus

Feb 15: Vega and Hamal

Mar 15: Vega and Hamal

Apr 15: Vega and Hamal

May 15: Polaris and Mira

June 15: Bogardus and Markab

July 15: Capella and Denebola

Aug 15: Capella and Denebola

Sept 15: Alkaid and Procyon

Oct 15: Alkaid and Procyon

Nov 15: Vega and Denebola

Dec 15: Alkaid and Altair

None of which are Mizar. Vega, Altair, Arcturus, Polaris and Capella are great choices, eminently “findable” with the naked eye, and would give you one star out of the two to start with for 9 of the 12 months. Not bad.

Alternatively, there is a program by Jean Piquette, and available from the NexStar resource site that Michael Swanson runs. http://www.nexstarsite.com/Downloads.htm#SAS will take you to the program for download. This is a bit more technical than most people are likely going to be comfortable with in terms of setup…you have to edit a couple of text files to put in your info, then run the program, with it spitting out a few files that will tell you good choices. It is based on the 21 “NexStar” alignment stars that it likes by default.

When I run it today, Oct 22, 2017, it suggests the following for my area:

Altair Polaris

Altair Mizar

Vega Polaris

Vega Mizar

Vega Altair

Polaris Mizar

Six combinations of Altair, Polaris, Mizar and Vega, and almost all of which I could find no problem. Overall, I would say that this estimate is far better for me than the other one, although the first one has more range in choice of possible stars. This one does however give out a MUCH longer list of choices too, almost overwhelming in fact.

I’ll keep both programs and see what they give me from time to time. Something else to remember to do before I leave the house though. I’d prefer an app for that, and there ARE some options for downloading things in Sky Portal and/or Sky Safari Pro, but I’m not entirely clear how to combine the lists properly for prioritization. More like “good sets” in general, regardless if they are actually visible tonight or make good combos for tonight compared to others.

But I’m getting farther afield from the original premise — how to align properly for general process, not which stars are chosen. Hope this helps. Of course, your mileage may vary.

I’m a government HR geek, and I like reading Public Service Labour Relations and Employment Board decisions just to see what’s going on in the world of grievances that make it that far (many drop out earlier with simple alternate arrangements or the government realizing it did something wrong and reversing itself). One that made it that far recently was Song v. Deputy Minister National Defence. And mostly what I like about it was the unique outcome.

As is often the case, the issue started with a competition where a candidate was screened out at the application stage. It is always the applicant’s responsibility to demonstrate they meet the criteria and if they don’t, they’re out. This can and often is a pretty hard and fast rule. Many rulings are out there on this factor — if they don’t say it in the application, you don’t have to accept follow-up info or anything else, and if you do, it should only be in very unusual situations (for example, the person has to prove they did budget forecasting, and they say they completed three years work of budget updates in their current job — without specifying that it includes both reporting and forecasting for the coming year…when they follow-up, they find out that the screener’s department use different terminology, and so “updates” there doesn’t include forecasting, but now that they know what it means, and they may even look at a sample, they say, “Oh, okay, you do meet it” and might screen them in…or say, “Sorry, no, you didn’t prove it in the original application, not our problem, you’re out”). In this case, the applicant contacted the hiring manager, had some additional weak examples, and wanted a chance at the interview.

At this point, the hiring manager made an error. They thought, “no harm, no foul” giving them a chance — but says she really didn’t think they met the screening criteria. That shouldn’t happen. You meet it and you’re in, or you don’t and you’re out. Borderline is a different story, but here she said the applicant clearly wasn’t qualified and let them continue anyway.

The assessment phase seemed to be combination written+interview, with part of the written to develop a presentation that was then given as part of the interview. The applicant became ill during the session, so much so that they laid down and the Board actually discussed calling an ambulance. While testimony varies as to who decided to proceed after she felt better, this too was another error. They should not have proceeded.

The candidate failed two elements for the assessment that shouldn’t have continued, and she fought the decision as well as damages for suffering. Under the old PS Tribunal, that wasn’t an option, but the reformed PSLRB+PSTribunal = PSLREB has some extra party favours for participants. However, the outcome is a bit different.

The decision states that the first problem was letting the candidate proceed at all and the second was proceeding after illness. So the complaint is substantiated at that point. However, the candidate shouldn’t have made it to the assessment, and regardless of what happened, there was no evidence of malice or intent. So no damages. End result? The tribunal says “yes there was an error, you’re right, but I’m not telling them to do anything else about it”.

So for the complainant? She gets told not only are we not going to give you any money, not only are we not going to put you in the pool, not only are we not going to let you redo the assessment, but also you weren’t qualified in the first place. Or in other words, “Yep, you’re right overall. Case closed.”

While I don’t think she should have got any money for her supposed suffering (there was no bias, discrimination or malice, she just had a illness spell during the process), the outcome is a bit harsh for the complainant. Which is often the case — the government people felt from the beginning she was wrong, so they pushed through to the end to technically lose but still win.

So I’ve been spending a lot of time uploading old photos to my website, and now that I have a healthy base to work with, I’m working on some photobooks. Nothing too “fancy”, mostly just “year in review” type books.

I’ve used Shutterfly before, and while it puts out a decent book, I have two reservations with it. First, because they aren’t produced in Canada, you end up spending a heavy chunk of cash on shipping. Not exorbitant, just enough to notice. Price goes higher the faster you want it, as it would be anywhere.

Second, and a little more vague, the photo places often ship them overseas for production to Asia, and there is little regulation for either labour or the production methods used in a lot of the hot spots. We recently had a canvas print shipped from Malaysia (by Photobook Canada, not Shutterfly) and it came in smelling like musty canvas — turned out it was a lacquer they used on the finishing. There’s no way it would be allowed to be shipped in that condition in Canada, would never pass the sniff test, literally. The print stunk bad enough I had to put in the garage for a few days to air out. It’s relatively fine now, but not the most reassuring of experiences. And Shutterfly uses the same printing options/places.

On the plus side, they are reliable, they have regular sales, their coupons are stackable (i.e. 30% off for a sale, $10 off on books, free shipping etc. — most sites would make you choose one, Shutterfly usually lets you apply all of them to your order at once). I recently did a full year in review book with them, haven’t received it yet, but it has a LOT of extra pages (80+, when standard is 40) and price is about $75 in the end, including shipping, etc. Not great, not horrendous. None of the extra bells and whistles. And their software has a couple of painful omissions (an ability to duplicate or move pages, for instance). A solid 8 / 10 for sure on quality, software and price.

Mixbooks is the big blogger darling in the U.S. at present, with lots of people saying it is 10/10 for quality and software, maybe 8/10 for price. They are competitive with the other companies, but coupons are not stackable and their sales are not as frequent or as deep. I found the software good, but unwieldy at times. In the end, I bailed before completing an order.

Photobook Canada is one that everyone likes to say is better because it is supposedly Canadian, but the stats on their production in Canada are extremely limited. Most of their cheap stuff they farm overseas, maybe they used to do their stuff and prints here in Canada but looks like it is all off-shore now. The smelly canvas came from Malaysia, two calendars came from Malaysia. A small astronomy book I did awhile ago came from Asia somewhere. I’ve just ordered a small book as a gift, and I suspect it will also come from Malaysia. Software is not as good as Mixbooks or Shutterfly, but functional, and their cheap options are good for price at least, if not enduring quality. Their other fantastic feature, in my view, is that their software is 100% downloadable. You can build the entire book on your own computer and just connect when you’re done. It takes a while for everything to upload at that point, but it’s better and faster than working in the cloud the whole time. I used them for the calendars (and make a rookie error with them) and the canvas print (that was initially smelly and is okay now), but I should also give them credit for the fact that my vouchers had expired (I didn’t realize they did that when I bought them last January), and they extended them with no trouble at all. Nice.

I checked out a bunch of other sites this week too.

Shoppers Drug Mart has a good basic option, software seems a little limited, and prices are okay but competitive. Their big “savings” offering is that it is free shipping to their local stores (I discovered their options earlier this week when sending some simple prints to a remote store). However, the software crashed completely in basic options working with both Firefox and Microsoft Edge. I’m not willing to invest any time in buggy software.

Uniprix seemed okay, nothing flashy. Basic software, prices were okay, seemed more geared to the pamphlet-style softcovers than some of the other bigger companies. I don’t know that I gave them a truly adequate test though.

Loblaws was a surprise for a couple of reasons. First, I didn’t know they had a photobook option — it strikes me if they were kicking butt, everyone would know about them. Second, their software is the SAME as Shoppers Drug Mart. Whoever is their backend supplier has given them the same front-end interface, with only minor differences. Seemed good, not as big and powerful as Shutterfly, Mixbooks or Photobook Canada, but decent enough. I even found some default templates I liked. But here’s the weird part…I chose a special template with some contemporary features i.e. not everything was blocky, squared designs. About half the default pages had a bit of a scrap-book feel to them, a common design feature. Except when I then went to the layouts feature to see what the options were for additional pages, none of those scrap-book layouts were available to select. All the rest were blocky, perfectly squared line ups. No obvious option to copy the existing templates either, unless I wanted to copy a page element at a time. But then it got even weirder…I chose a default template, added it to a page, and the photo sizes were completely wrong. I had the book set for 9×12″ size, and it put photos down as if they were going in a 6×6″ book. In other words, just part of the page…and no option to drag them as a group to make them bigger. You could manually adjust each and every photo individually. Nuh-uh, no way. That would be incredibly time consuming if I add some 50-60 additional pages, all of which required custom layouts. However, I have discovered that you CAN duplicate the original pages, just a bit of extra manual work to do it, kind of counter-intuitive.

Lots of people have used Costco and while I admire their commitment, the software was the worst one of all. Slow, few options, etc. If you had, say, 75 photos, and you wanted it to pre-populate them into a book template, it might be okay. But 10 minutes in and I’d already found 3 things I couldn’t do in the format. Not an option. Most importantly they had a lower limit on number of pages allowed. I was two-thirds of the way through a photobook when I came to a screeching halt — I couldn’t add anything else, and couldn’t copy the project to another project (I would have just split it into two books).

Henry’s has a site that has the same back-end as Loblaws and Shoppers Drug Mart (same themes, etc.) but a completely different interface. Looks okay, but it won’t actually let me load any photos from the album into the layout to try it. It didn’t want to sync with other sites either. Kind of hard to do a photo book if you can’t get photos into the layout! Fail.

I think I’m going to give the Loblaw’s one another go. We’ll see if it works out. Might try UniPrix after that, based on a friend’s recommendation. In the end, I’m likely to end up back with Shutterfly, but it won’t be for a lack of trying to find a Canadian supplier.

So going back to the beginning, now that you have seen pics of the outcomes, what went wrong during the process to cause such stress? It wasn’t just one thing of course, it was a variety of factors.

Initial design delays — we started asking for design meetings in January, pressured them throughout Jan / Feb / March and didn’t get any official designs until June 15th. Of the nine versions, eight of them were unworkable, a waste of paper not to mention the time and effort they put into doing them. It took another 45 days, mostly waiting on them to get back to us with answers to some questions that should have been dealt with back in April or May, but delayed us into the summer. This meant August 1st before we had an actual design.

Overall start delays — we wanted the project to start in mid-July and, based on the two week estimate, to be mostly over by August 1st. They didn’t even plan to start until August 17th, changed it to the 24th, and were going to run into September at least.

Extreme build delays — While they promised us September 11th at the absolute latest, they didn’t even have all the cabinets in until then. They had told me they were “down a man” but that didn’t explain going from 2 weeks + 1 weeks grace to finish things to seven weeks and me having to threaten them to finish that week or we would hire alternate contractors. Each week I thought, “Okay, they’ll be done this week.” And then the weekend would come, and they weren’t much closer than the previous week. In a related issue, it wasn’t any “one thing” that was running them over for time. If drywall wouldn’t set, or the floor wouldn’t dry, or they were missing ceiling tiles, or the plumber ran off with the electrician’s wife, I could see a “trigger” that was causing delays. Instead, and tied to their slowness in doing the basement, this is just them — they vastly underestimate the time to complete the job, and then run late. I imagine most people forgive them delays because (a) they still show up to do the work and (b) it’s quality work. Or at least quality-ish. See more below.

The disruption — I mentioned earlier that this was partly our inexperience in doing this type of reno, but I thought naively that we would mostly be just disrupted in the kitchen. Nope. Kitchen, family room, living room, all of first floor, door to the patio, my garage was a long-term disaster. I even had to cancel a party planned for Andrea’s birthday and an astronomy outing because the work wasn’t done for the first one and the garage was so crowded, I couldn’t get to my astronomy equipment for the second. Each week, I wanted to rip them a new one, and they kept going longer, and longer, and longer still.

The errors — I didn’t talk about this much in the previous posts, but they made some fairly basic errors that had to be corrected, some minor, some major. I already talked about the pantry problem — they knew we wanted to put cupboards and an upright freezer in there, they measured everything, told us there was room, and then when it was built and the freezer put in there, it didn’t work at all. Like not even close to functional. Pure and simple, outright error. We had to choose between major refit to keep it there, or just move it back downstairs; we opted for expediency over design perfection. That was after I had to talk to them twice about the width of the door into the pantry and the need to make it big enough to accommodate the freezer. Again, they had the specs, they just failed to plan properly for the transfer. I caught it in time, but still. Equally, they completely screwed up on the fridge placement. They swore to me it could go against the right wall, which it couldn’t — the door has to swing 9 full inches past 90 degrees in order for the base drawers to pull out. They put it against the wall, and even the handle was hitting before 90 degrees. They wondered if we were willing to “live with it”; we said “No, rip out 9 inches of cupboard to the left, and by the way, this is your error and your expense to fix.” It wasn’t simple, it wasn’t pretty, it ended up with 9 inches of dead space on the right side (could have been a broom closet, but we already have that), might fix it later but for now it’s dead. But we insisted they do it. Of course that messed up the bulkheads, framing cupboards, counters that were already measured, etc. At the opposite end of the wall, they put a bottom cupboard (that was supposed to be double-doors with pull-out drawers) against the wall to the left. Great, except when you put a handle on the door, it banged against the wall, keeping it from going 90 degrees, and like with the refrigerator, the drawers wouldn’t pull all the way out. The cupboard had to be converted to being just exterior drawers. There were a number of other errors, but the only other big one was the china cabinet…because of a wrinkle in the design, they thought the cupboard was only 4″ deep. Again, I thought, “Who would build a china cabinet and not think 4″ was worthy of a WTF moment and a need to ask questions?” As with the fridge, we told them it had to be fixed. Note these are all separate from the 15 design errors they made when they repeatedly didn’t give us the larger sink we asked for from Day 1.

If we were design experts, maybe we would have caught some of those before they happened. On the other hand, as experienced contractors, they should have caught them before we ever did. I found it incredibly stressful, and this is likely considered by many to being a “good news example” of using contractors. However, as I said, at the end I had to threaten them with other contractors to finish it. They were supposed to be done, almost there, and then I got home expecting them to be done and found out nobody had come at all that day. They were at 99% done, so I finally lost it. Seven weeks for a two-week project, five weeks overdue, and they didn’t even show up to finish. Not once did they suggest coming earlier or staying later, or doing some of the work on the weekend. In the end, they finished it on the Friday (the day after my threat).

Honestly, I was worried about the final bill. I discussed it with Andrea, and I said I was basically willing to pay a little extra because we had tweaked a few things, but I wasn’t willing to go much beyond the original quote. When the bill arrived and it was $8K over what I was expecting, I just about lost it. I was ready to go to war at that point. Then, when I reviewed the bill, I realized that most of it was for the countertops that we had planned to pay for ourselves directly and instead they paid for them. The rest were substitutions and changes for things that hadn’t been included in the original charge (such as some lighting fixtures, etc.). All legitimate adjustments. So they charged exactly the quote plus the needed adjustments. We signed the cheque and showed them the door. And here is the awesome final product.

As they say in the funny pages, all’s well that ends well, or in this case, all’s well that, well, ends.

I have a Celestron NexStar 8SE telescope…for those not in the know, that’s an 8″ optical tube on a simple tripod. They call them one-armed bandits (like the slot machines) because there is a single arm that goes from the tripod mount that it rests on up to the tube. Simple, easy to work, but it isn’t very stable, at least not in astronomical viewing terms. It doesn’t allow for much in the way of astro photography due to its limited ability to track the sky over time, thus limiting the photography options of long-exposures. However, there is one feature where the 8SE shines — it’s ease of use.

This was a key ingredient for me in buying a scope, based on knowledge of who I am and the patience I have. If a scope takes 30 minutes to setup, I’m not likely to use it. I need something relatively simple, and the 8SE requires you to basically setup the tripod, attach the scope to the arm, add some power and eyepieces, and you’re good to go. More or less.

The second feature that was a huge selling feature for me is what they call the “go to” feature. You run a simple alignment procedure on the scope, the computer on the mount figures out what stars you are looking at, and after that, it knows where all the other stars and planets should be. So, in theory, you do the alignment, and then after that, you look at a menu, tell it you want to see Saturn, and Bob’s your uncle, the computer will slew your scope around to Saturn. Tell it to show you the Ring Nebula, and bam, there it is.

Except my scope didn’t seem to do that. Sure, it found the moon and planets pretty well, not always dead centre, but certainly within the eyepiece. But beyond that, I have never really seen much. I’ve had the scope just over two years, and while large periods of time in there were “down time”, I have used it a fair number of times. Almost always on my own though, and never with another scope right beside me to show me what I “should” be seeing. Or not seeing, as the case may be. Even in the dark skies near my inlaw’s cottage, I saw interesting things, but no nebulae, no galaxies. Variable stars, definitely planets, but no real deep sky objects (DSOs). It has been rather frustrating, and I was never quite sure what the problem was. A couple of times I felt like almost pitching the hobby, since I didn’t see much more than planets. Cool, sure, but long term without photography? I wasn’t sure what the problem was, but I was determined to find it before giving up the hobby.

A few weeks ago, I was at a star party organized by the RASC Ottawa Centre out in Carp (just west of Ottawa in a dark parking lot). After most of the lookie-loos had left, I was talking to a guy next to me who was showing the Ring Nebula, so I popped over, looked through his scope and there it was, clear as day. I went back to my scope, pulled up the Ring Nebula from my menu, slewed to it, and nothing. Nothing even close to it in my scope. His scope was different from mine (a Dobsonian), but not any more powerful, so I said, “Shouldn’t I be able to resolve it too?”. He said of course, came over, looked through the scope and said, “Hey, your alignment is off”. And with those five words, my random series of possible problems collapsed to a range around one. He adjusted my scope, I looked, and sure enough, there it was, easy peasy lemon squeezy. I didn’t know whether to laugh in relief that my scope could resolve it or cry because I’d wasted 2 years trying to figure out how to work it properly.

The larger range of possibilities

I had been wondering if the problem was amongst a bunch of possibilities. First and foremost, it was possible my eyes were just not good enough to see the faint objects. I am getting older, turned 47 recently, and as you get older, fainter objects are harder and harder to see. But when the other guy put my scope on the Ring Nebula, that possibility was clearly eliminated.

Second, I wondered if my scope wasn’t good enough. I had bought one of the higher-end entry level scopes, but wondered if maybe I’d chosen wrong (sacrificing viewing too much) or just got a lemon with bad optics. But the Ring Nebula was visible, so not optics. Neither the scope nor of eyepieces either.

Third, I had been wondering if maybe it was the suburban skies — perhaps they were just too light polluted for me to see these things, as most of my viewing happens in city parks, etc. While this was a darkened parking lot, it is by no means a dark site, so no problem there.

Last, I had considered it might be an alignment issue, but planets were always aligned, and most large stars like Antares, Polaris, etc. But with this guy’s five minutes of help, all the possibilities collapsed to this one…my alignment was off.

Fixing alignment

As with the larger range above, there are lots of reasons why the scope could be misaligned. With the help of some people online who have the same scope, and the people at the store who sold me the scope, I compiled a list of things to try.

The first thing I had to check was the physical setup. My scope was always pretty level early on, so I had stopped fussing about it too much. Never seemed to make much difference, the computer knew where the stars were, so I was golden, or so I thought. I’ve added a bubble level app to my phone and now use that to try to get my mount as level as possible, still using the vibration pads to limit shake.

Next, I looked at the initial computer setup. Normally, I keep it set for Ottawa and just have to put in the time and location. That has always seemed a bit general to my mind, but since the computer always seemed to figure it out, I went with it before. This time, I upgraded to a wifi connector that ties directly to my phone — which gives it my precise GPS location as well as local time down to the second. Can’t get much more precise than that.

Third, I have been really inconsistent with my choice of stars. I would say generally I was choosing stars in a 90-120 degree section of the sky most of the time. In some cases it was simply because that was the part of the sky I could see, other times it just happened to be where the first few bright stars were located. Other times, when I was particularly impatient, I’d even used planets as one of the three stars in the three-star alignment process. The computer let me do it, and I’d read instructions online that said you could do it — I didn’t realize they were saying you could do it, not that you should do it. Using a planet apparently adds in a lot of variability to the calculations, as does using stars close together. So, I changed my setup — I now use stars as far apart as possible, and try to cover as much of the sky as I can in my setup with three stars far from each other. Almost like an equilateral triangle in the sky.

Finally, I have always had a question about which eyepieces to use when I’m aligning. The scope comes with a 25mm plossl, but I also have a really nice 17.3mm Televue, a 10mm Televue Delos, and an 8mm Televue plossl. I was never sure how zoomed in I should be to say it was centred in the scope but I tended to use the 17mm lens. Both the online community, the help pages for the scope and the store had the same recommendation for change — buy a 12 mm red-lighted reticle eyepiece and use that to ensure it is centred. If that sounds confusing, it is basically a higher powered eyepiece than the one I was using before, and the red light reticle is an illuminated cross-hairs design…put the star in the centre of the crosshairs and tell the computer it is aligned. No guessing if it is in the “centre” of the eyepiece — it’s dead centre when it’s in the cross-hairs.

I had four other possibilities to try messing with if these four didn’t fix the problem … it could have been the mount itself (I had problems with gears meshing last year, but this problem predated that issue); my scope could have been out of alignment on the optics (had already checked that a few months ago, still perfectly aligned); my diagonal coul d have been out of whack (which could be checked at the store); or my firmware on the mount could have been out of date. They were on my list of possibilities affecting my alignment, but the others were easier to check first against “normal” setup.

The results

Apparently, I’ve just been a complete idiot for two years. If the guy at the star party hadn’t told me that my alignment was off, I’d still have been struggling to find the problem. I did the four steps above (physical leveling, wifi with coordinates, better star choices, and a illuminated reticle eyepiece).

Got it all setup, but had a lot of trouble with focusing on stars the night I tried due to haze (just bad seeing), took me more than an hour to align. And then as I was just about done, my wifi connector dropped the signal and I lost my setup. So I took a fifteen minute break, let some clouds pass by, and then tried again. Five minutes and I was done.

First test was a planet, but that was too easy. So I chose the Ring Nebula. And BAM! There it was. Easily seen from my light polluted park. It was awesome. I wandered around the sky on the app just trying out a bunch of things. I still have not seen the big galaxies, not quite sure why those are not resolving but could have been time of day. Clusters are perfect. Double stars. Variable stars. Everything shows up. It isn’t quite centred each time, but it’s within the field of view, so the margin of error is manageable. Over time, I hope that will improve as I improve my alignment procedures.

Overall though, I’m back on track. As I said earlier, I can’t decide between being happy everything is working the way it should or that it didn’t work for the last two years because I didn’t know what I was doing.

I’m sure there are lots of people reading this and laughing because they think anyone who uses a go to scope is an idiot anyway. Feel free to do so, but it just means you missed the upfront side of things. I do know how to star hop, and I can find things, but it’s not how I’m wired…when I’ve done it, I can find stars, but nothing else. Now I can use the GoTo scope to at least let me see what it is I’m supposed to find, and then learn to starhop between things better with some expectation of success. It’s also a bit of the reason why I’ve struggled on my own for 2 years — there are a lot of nobs out there who basically turn into technique snobs and rather than help someone who is learning to do it one way, they instead say “Oh that way is stupid, here’s the only way to do it.” Different strokes for different folks.

But one guy who helped for five minutes with no attitude or judgement altered my entire experience. I’m back “in” for the hobby, and I never even caught his name!